Computing probabilistic bisimilarity distances for probabilistic automata

Bacci, Giorgio and Bacci, Giovanni and Larsen, Kim G. and Mardare, Radu and Tang, Qiyi and van Breugel, Franck; Fokkink, Wan and van Glabbeek, Rob, eds. (2019) Computing probabilistic bisimilarity distances for probabilistic automata. In: 30th International Conference on Concurrency Theory, CONCUR 2019. Schloss Dagstuhl- Leibniz-Zentrum fur Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing, NLD. ISBN 9783959771214 (https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2019.9)

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Abstract

The probabilistic bisimilarity distance of Deng et al. has been proposed as a robust quantitative generalization of Segala and Lynch’s probabilistic bisimilarity for probabilistic automata. In this paper, we present a novel characterization of the bisimilarity distance as the solution of a simple stochastic game. The characterization gives us an algorithm to compute the distances by applying Condon’s simple policy iteration on these games. The correctness of Condon’s approach, however, relies on the assumption that the games are stopping. Our games may be non-stopping in general, yet we are able to prove termination for this extended class of games. Already other algorithms have been proposed in the literature to compute these distances, with complexity in UP ∩ coUP and PPAD. Despite the theoretical relevance, these algorithms are inefficient in practice. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first practical solution. In the proofs of all the above-mentioned results, an alternative presentation of the Hausdorff distance due to Mémoli plays a central rôle.

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